Do You Like Listening to Your News?
This week’s updates give us new smart speaker shipment numbers, a view on the opportunity of voice in the enterprise, and a top novelist launching his book as a chatbot.
Challenges remain with voice though. Among them, computer-generated spoken news — that’s great to listen to — is really hard.
This week we see also China’s latest virtual news reader in English, and you can compare it against THIS news briefing with our trial audio version using SpeechKit.io.
Numbers That Matter
Smart speaker growth 53% year-on-year
Shipments continue to accelerate from global shipments of 59.1 million as of 2nd quarter 2018. Chinese brands look to be growing the most. Notably though, in the West, Siri still dominates actual usage.
Leading the Pack
Top novelist releases novel as a chatbot
James Patterson has sold 375 million books. The chatbot version of his latest novel,”The Chef”, is available now on Facebook Instant Messenger. Let us know if you think this is the future of novels!
Unlocking enterprise knowledge with NLP
A huge opportunity lies in front of enterprises today: accessing what customers and staff are saying. Previously locked away in impenetrable audio files, the quality of automatic transcription to searchable text has hit a sweet spot this year, while prices are expected to drop rapidly. An interview with Voicera’s CEO talks about the success they’re having with a range of enterprise use cases.
Chinese robot news presenter’s English launch
China has had robot news presenters for a while now, but this is the first time we’ve seen an English-speaking one. Along with the words come subtle facial, eye, head and body gestures. Have a look at SpeechKit’s view on the newsreader.
Under the Hood
Attendee numbers double at top natural language technology conference
Is natural language technology a fad or here to stay? One top European conference “Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing” held in Brussels had double the number of attendees from last year, topping 2500 people. The conference had a particular focus on automated translation, but what really appealed to us was Microsoft’s workshop on how to create advanced chatbots.
CognitionX Research
The CognitionX Chatbot Business Primer
Is a chatbot right for your business? Where should you start? What tools should you use? These are not easy questions to answer, so CognitionX created “The Business of Natural Language Computing: a primer on chatbots and voicebots”. Download a taster for free.
